The Pelican Pantry

Welcome to The Pelican Pantry — part food memoir, part recipe book, part eating guide, part "healthy food" criticism, part pantry management tips, part grocery politics, part "what the hell do I do with 2 pounds of daikon radish in this week's CSA?!" brainstorming. In other words, I'm not quite...

This past weekend, for the first time since I started getting my health in order, I didn't track what I ate. We were out-of-town, hiking almost 14 miles a day. I'd carefully purchased some snacks. We weren't in the wilderness — I didn't have to worry about the weight of...

Kin finally scheduled his bloodwork for next Friday, so we'll have some more insight on what, if any, changes we need to make to our diets. But in the meantime, I'm trying to get better, just in general, at cooking "healthy" (again, whatever that means). I've made some changes: I've...

I'm putting my muffin experiment on hold because this past weekend's batch of muffins was so awful that I can no longer maintain my enthusiasm for this project. I'm just going to work my way through all the Superhero muffins in Elyse Kopecky and Shalane Flanagan's cookbooks — there are...

I am taking a lot of online classes right now — as one does, I suppose, in the middle (the end?) of a pandemic; as one does, I suppose, when one is weighing a major career change. Most of these pertain to health and wellness in some way, and on...

The Great Muffin Experiment, No. 12 (Jump to the Recipe) Several years ago, I decided to quit drinking coffee. I didn't like being addicted to caffeine, as I was traveling all the time and hated having to find a cup of coffee first thing each morning in a strange city...

The Great Muffin Experiment, No. 11 (Jump to the Recipe) A month or so ago, I was worried that we'd never finish all the fruit I had in the freezer, as each week, we received a new boxful from the CSA. While I do still have quite a bit of...

As I noted previously, I've had some pretty terrible homemade granola. But most of the recipes I've tried have been really good. All the flavors work together. There's no bite of something — be it dried fruit or a nut or a grain — that clashes with everything else in...

I love kitchen gadgets and appliances. No matter the size of my kitchen, every drawer and cabinet will be full of them. I pulled the juicer our from the back of one this morning, so I could squeeze the rest of the citrus in the fruit basket before we picked...

The Great Muffin Experiment, No. 10 (Jump to the Recipe) One of the primary ways in which I'm experimenting with my muffin-making is by trying different kinds of flours. Me, I don't have any particular issue with gluten. After an elimination diet, I would describe myself as "gluten sensitive" perhaps,...